Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Doug Henschen.

Nearly one year after announcing plans to offer its Dynamics enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications as cloud-based services, Microsoft finally will reveal specifics and details on those services on Monday at its annual Convergence Conference, being held this year in Houston, Texas.

The crux of the news: Dynamics NAV 2013 and Dynamics GP 2013 will be enabled for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and they will be generally available by the end of this year. A beta release of NAV 2013 is expected by May, and a GP beta is expected in late summer. Microsoft qualified that the cloud-based versions of NAV and GP will be "optimized for small and midsize businesses."…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

With the rise of cloud computing, we’re seeing more of a new breed of extremely lightweight company, unencumbered by capital investments, acting as a broker of services assembled from offerings drawn from or supported by third-party providers. Imagine the possibilities when this is combined with the emerging mobile “App Economy,” in which budding enterprises can be supported by micro-revenues streaming in from online app sales.

One such story is Visible Market, creators of StockTouch, an app that tracks financial data. Visible Market, launched about a year ago, represents a new breed of business startup, built on the cloud and catering to a highly mobile user base…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Breaking with tradition – and changing the definition of a growth company in the process – Apple Monday morning said it would start paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share in the September quarter.

At $10.60 a year that would currently be about a 1.8% yield, putting it among the highest dividend payers in the US, but disappointing analysts who thought it could easily afford 3% or more…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

As regards clouds in general, “storm” is not a word you would want to hear. However, by storming the clouds, I refer to the new Xeon chip’s ability to make cloud computing faster and more resilient. If you are a sports fan and familiar with the Olympics motto of “Citius (faster), Altius (higher), Fortius (stronger),” you will be interested to know that the Xeon E5 speeds up computing in the cloud, elevates it to higher energy efficiency and strengthens it through enhanced redundancy. I spoke with Cloud Computing and Data Center Industry Engagement Manager at Intel IT, Ajay Chandramouly, to understand how.

Describing himself initially as a “non-believer” and then a “convert turned zealot,” Ajay mentioned his initial skepticism to believe the hype around cloud computing. However, having witnessed firsthand its immense benefits to Intel IT, he has migrated to the cloud, pun intended. Ajay described how Intel is using the private cloud to enhance its internal systems and improve productivity, activities that have seen the company bag a coveted CIO 100 Award…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Nathan Eddy.

Accellos Inc., a provider of supply chain execution software solutions, announced the launch of its AccellosOne warehouse management system (WMS) in a cloud deployment option. The offering will be available for review at Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2012. The platform offers warehouse management capability in a hosted model using enterprise cloud technology.

Key features of AccellosOne Cloud WMS include flexible subscription pricing, technical administration such as backup, disaster recovery and system availability monitoring provided by Accellos, software updates included as part of the service, elastic computing resources, the ability to personalize systems to meet the needs of specific distribution centers and standard integration to many accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages, including Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, and SAP BusinessOne…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing ( http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/ ) company, today announced the Salesforce Service Cloud has won two CRM magazine 2012 Service Leader Awards in the Customer Case Management and Web Support categories.

The Service Cloud won for Customer Case Management in the category’s inaugural year, and took home top honors in the Web Support category. The magazine also awarded the CRM magazine 2012 Service Elite Award to social enterprises Corel and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines for their success in delivering business-to-consumer customer service with the Service Cloud.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Paul Krill.

Oracle’s wish list for Java beyond next year’s planned Java SE (Standard Edition) 8 release includes object capabilities, as well as enhancements for ease-of-use, cloud computing, and advanced optimisations.

JDK (Java Development Kit) 10 and releases beyond it are intended to have a unified type system, in which everything would be made into objects, with no more primitives, according to an Oracle slide presentation entitled "To Java SE 8 and Beyond!" posted on the QCon conference website. Oracle cites an ambitious list of goals for Java in the presentation, which was apparently delivered by Oracle Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter last week. A slide entitled "Java SE 9 (and Beyond)" reveals goals for interoperability, including having a multilanguage JVM and improved Java/native integration…

Grazed from HostReview.  Author: Christa Joe.

One of the major advancement in technology that organizations use these days to optimally utilize their IT infrastructure services is Cloud Computing. Cloud computing platforms allow companies to use infrastructure, software and other applications as a service rather than a product. This minimizes the extra cost of installation of resources at unit level and installing a single infrastructure unit supports a cluster of users, while each user thinks of resource as a dedicated unit for him.

But the technology is never granted to a single authority and a number of cloud computing companies are present in the market providing platforms, according to the budget and requirement of the client. So, the main concern for a client is to choose a correct platform for its working. Many cloud providers are available in the market with the same core functionality but along with it they have a USP of their own, the parameter that differentiates them with others providing the same service to the client…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro.  Author: Sean Deuby.

Identity as a service (IDaaS) was developed to deal with a new need that’s arisen with the popularity of cloud computing: identity management for the exploding number of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications available on an almost instant basis. At the end of 2011, Gartner estimated that global SaaS revenue hit $12 billion, a 21 percent increase over 2010, and that SaaS will account for 15 percent of enterprise application purchases by 2015. And right along with this growth is the problem of how to manage user identities for all of these applications.

Adding the on-premises capability of securely managing cloud identities for SaaS applications requires some work. You need to set up an Internet single sign-on (SSO) federation solution, and once you’ve set it up, you have to manage it. One of the larger tasks in running your own federation solution is managing the relationships of the ever-increasing number of SaaS vendors. Many companies simply don’t want to be adding these on-premises costs at the same time they’re shifting some of their IT capabilities to the cloud…